I was planning on writing a new A View From the Rafters this week, one of the easy WWE Backlash prediction ones. But here we are, unfortunately writing about the passing of a man who meant more to the wrestling industry than he gets credit for today. This time around, we’re looking at Ted Turner’s wrestling legacy.

So let’s get to it.

Ted Turner died today at the age of 87 after a long battle with Lewy body dementia. His family confirmed the news through Turner Enterprises, and CNN announced it on the air this morning. The mainstream coverage will rightfully focus on CNN, on TBS, on TNT, on Turner Classic Movies, on the billion dollars he gave to the United Nations, on the bison, on the America’s Cup, on the Atlanta Braves winning the World Series. He earned every word of every obituary that will be written this week.

But I want to talk about wrestling. Because for those of us who grew up in the South watching rasslin on Saturday nights, Ted Turner’s impact on this business goes deeper than most people under 40 will ever understand.

I grew up in Alabama, right near the Georgia state line. My dad was an NWA guy. Mid-Atlantic and Georgia Championship Wrestling were his wrestling promotions. Dusty Rhodes, Ric Flair and the Four Horsemen, Magnum T.A., Dick Slater, the Road Warriors, Bruiser Brody and Roddy Piper. Saturday nights in our house meant TBS was on and wrestling was happening. That wasn’t an accident. That was Ted Turner.

Georgia Championship Wrestling was the first NWA territory to get national cable television exposure, and it happened because Turner’s WTCG in Atlanta (which became Superstation TBS) carried the program every Saturday evening. When cable started going national in the late 1970s and early 1980s, that TBS timeslot turned a regional Georgia territory into something the entire country could watch. Without Turner, Southern wrestling stays regional. Without Turner, the NWA stays a loose collection of territories that most of America never sees. He didn’t just give wrestling a timeslot. He gave it a platform that changed what the business could be.

When Vince McMahon tried to muscle his way onto TBS in 1984 by buying Georgia Championship Wrestling’s timeslot (the infamous Black Saturday incident), it was Turner who fought back. He gave timeslots to Bill Watts’ Mid-South Wrestling and Ole Anderson’s Championship Wrestling from Georgia. Both of them outdrew the WWF on TBS. McMahon eventually sold his TBS slot to Jim Crockett Promotions, and that deal helped create the national version of NWA/WCW that became the foundation for everything that came after. Turner brokered that. Turner wanted wrestling on his network, and he was willing to fight McMahon to keep it there.

When Jim Crockett Promotions was drowning financially in 1988, Turner bought it outright and renamed it World Championship Wrestling. He promised fans that WCW would maintain the athlete-oriented style of the NWA. For a while, it did. The early WCW years, pre-Hogan, were my WCW. Sting, Lex Luger, the Steiners, Vader, Ricky Steamboat, Barry Windham, Arn Anderson, Sid Vicious and Ron Simmons. That era doesn’t get talked about enough because everything gets overshadowed by the Monday Night Wars and the nWo, but those early 1990s WCW shows on TBS were my introduction to wrestling as a kid. My dad had his NWA guys. I had mine. And both of us had them because Ted Turner kept wrestling on television.

Then came 1995. Eric Bischoff convinced Turner in a face-to-face meeting that WCW needed a weekly show on TNT to compete with the WWF’s Monday Night Raw. Turner said yes, and Monday Nitro was born. For 83 consecutive weeks, WCW beat the WWF in the ratings. Eighty-three weeks. The Monday Night Wars made professional wrestling the hottest thing in American entertainment, and it happened because a billionaire from Atlanta believed in the product enough to fund the war.

People forget that Turner was a genuine wrestling fan. He wasn’t some corporate suit who tolerated wrestling because it drew ratings. He liked it. He watched it. He wanted it on his networks. When WCW died in 2001, it wasn’t because Turner lost faith. It was because Jamie Kellner, who took control of the Turner Broadcasting division after the AOL-Time Warner merger, decided wrestling didn’t fit the network’s image. Kellner cancelled WCW’s programming on TBS and TNT despite the fact that WCW Thunder was the highest-rated show on TBS at the time. Turner had already been pushed out of his own company by then. He didn’t kill WCW. The corporate suits who took his company from him did.

It’s been 25 years since WCW closed its doors, and the wrestling business has never been the same. For all the good that AEW has done in creating an alternative to WWE, the scale of what Turner built with WCW was something entirely different. He had the resources, the television infrastructure, and the willingness to go to war with Vince McMahon in a way that nobody else has been able to replicate. Competition made both companies better. The Attitude Era doesn’t happen without Nitro breathing down Raw’s neck. Steve Austin, The Rock, the entire boom period of the late 1990s exists because Ted Turner funded the only real threat McMahon ever faced.

Turner also owned the Atlanta Braves, and as a kid growing up near the Georgia line, that mattered too. TBS carried the Braves nationally, turning them into “America’s Team” long before they won the World Series in 1995 which I still remember watching and can name just about every player on that team. Turner even named himself manager for a game in 1977, which went about as well as you’d expect (they lost). But that was Turner. He did things because he wanted to, not because they made sense on a spreadsheet.

He was 87 and had been battling Lewy body dementia since 2018. The man who built CNN, TBS, TNT, Turner Classic Movies, and the Cartoon Network. The man who gave billions away. The man who won the America’s Cup. The man who married Jane Fonda. The man who created Captain Planet. The man who owned two million acres of American land and raised bison because he read about them when he was ten years old and decided he wanted to save them. And the man who brought territorial southern wrestling, Georgia Championship wrestling, to a national broadcast audience before Vince McMahon ever bought WWF from his dad.

And the man who kept wrestling on television when it would have been easier and probably smarter to let it go.

Rest easy, Ted. The South remembers.

Agree, disagree, or think I got it completely wrong? Say so in the comments or over at the Vortex Effect forums.